Big Events 2008-2019
Use this space to track backstory events with wide-ranging implications, eg: = 2009 = * London "oyster harvest" hack brings the city to a standstill, severely denting European confidence in the commercial RFID smarcard. = 2010 = * 2010 Climate Accord signed, replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a much stricter set of emissions targets. * Air disasters - unspecified. Resulted in restrictions that all but ended air travel for civilians. = 2011 = * Foundation of SERAA from a collection of municipal and intentional community resilience activists. = 2012 = * A minor avian influenza pandemic, known popularly at the time as Bird Flu, spreads through the United States. It had a low transmission rate (RO=1.10), and low fatality rate (CFR=2/10,000) and was quelled due to intense and immediate non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social distancing. = 2013 = * Ethnic tensions in the UK erupt in a series of urban riots, claiming the lives of approximately 1,000 people across the country. =2014 = * Central African states lose track of their national borders as disaster and war intersect. * 6 Nov: Signal Hill earthquake, Los Angeles, California. Damage localized but massive casualties and collapse of double-decker project on Interstate 710 create long-term refugee and transport issues. = 2015 = *'Megahurricane season of 2015' In the late summer and fall of 2015, a series of powerful hurricanes hit the Carribean and the Gulf Coast of North America, resulting in an unprecidented humanitarian crisis within the United States. Initial attempts by FEMA to provide humanitarian relief were replaced in short order by martial law, as Homeland Security operations tried to keep climate refugees, and all the security and public health issues they carried with them, under control. The perceived mismanagement of the crisis by federal forces led to a massive "grassroots" effort to force through independant relief efforts. People began to smuggle food and medicine into the storm zone, and smuggle refugees out, ignoring warnings from FEMA and the CDC. Homeland Security and the National Guard began military operations to curb these activities, triggering a response from normally anti-social groups such as 18th Street and the Hell's Angels, leading in some cases to open warfare, mass desertions from the National Guard, and serious talk of insurrection within the United States. There was no insurrection. Once the crisis was past and recovery operations began, most Americans returned to their normal lives. But the events of the hurricane season of 2015 and its aftermath, the horror stories told by survivors of the FEMA camps, undermined the authority of the federal government and may have led to the legislative changes in the later election cycles. Many people point to 2015 as the year that SERAA - the South East Resilience Action Area - began to carry the primary responsibility for disaster relief south of the Mason-Dixon line, and where grass roots community organizing began to be clearly more effective than centralized government services. * DCAR emerges as self-governance over cell phones is introduced into refugee camps * The Democratic Party of the United States of America, bowing to growing pressure from county and state parties, begins governing itself via Formal Consensus, and makes puts a plank in its platform calling on the Unites States of America to govern itself using the same process instead of majority rule voting. = 2018 = *'October:' Bliss Canyon Firestorm consumes significant acreage of San Gabriel Mountains and destroys homes and businesses in five cities in Northern San Gabriel Valley in California. City of Bradbury is destroyed. = 2019 = *'September:' CERN approves budget of seven billion Euros to construct new supercollider, dubbed the "LHC2"